December 2024 site update

Jan. 13, 2025

Here's your site update for what we were up to in December 2024.

December saw us upload the first tranche of those rare Belle Isle photos we’ve been telling you about. Our Patreon members got an exclusive first peek before we opened it up to everyone else. In all, we have uploaded 233 images from Vance Patrick’s Belle Isle collection, ranging from old family candids on the island to shots from newspaper archives. Most of these images have not been seen in 50 years or more, and some of them - namely, the family candids - have never been shared anywhere else. In addition to a slew of shots from the Belle Isle Zoo, there are images of the long-forgotten Belle Isle Sawmill, photos I’ve never seen before of the aftermath of the fire that destroyed the first Belle Isle Bridge, and a ton of images of the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory, Aquarium and Casino.

Not to be outdone, our very own Helmut Ziewers also continued to add a ton of stunning photography to the site, with 98 of his own images last month. These include photos of the Winter at The Station event at Michigan Central Station (pictured above), featuring the restored depot decked out in its holiday regalia; interiors of the historic Dime and Buhl buildings; shots of the Anna Scripps Whitcomb Conservatory on Belle Isle after reopening following its two-year restoration effort; demolition shots of the Packard Plant and Kettering High School, and more.

Continuing the Belle Isle theme, December saw us add pages for five locations to the site. We added an admittedly half-hearted entry for all of Belle Isle in order to accommodate the photo galleries mentioned above. The history of the island is long, deep and important, so it’s going to take us a while to flush it out and do it justice, but there is some background there. We also added the old Belle Isle Lighthouse; the old Band Pavilion from which orchestras once serenaded passing canoeists; and the White House, which is the oldest structure on the island. In addition, we posted a history of the Roger Margerum House in Jefferson Chalmers, and dived into the revered Black architect’s background.

Lastly, I don’t normally disclose site metrics, but … last year, HistoricDetroit.org received a whopping 1.5 MILLION page views from 504,000 unique visitors. This is just for the site and doesn’t factor in all the views and engagement on our social media channels.

A huge thank you to our Patreon donors for helping to support our work and providing a free online resource for the community.

We’ve got so much more in store for you in 2025. We thank you for your support!

November update and 2024 year in review

Dec. 1, 2024

Season’s greetings from HistoricDetroit.org!

October and November updates

Our very own Helmut Ziewers has continued to add a ton of stunning photography to the site, more than 700 of them since October, in fact. This includes more than 50 images of the Detroit Public Library, St. Albertus Parish School, the iconic Grande Ballroom, the stunning interiors of the Water Board Building and Scarab Club, and the Detroit Institute of Arts, among many others. He also continued to document the demolition of the infamous Packard Plant, including camping out to watch its water tower come down, and started chronicling the renovation of the Lee Plaza.

We added eight buildings to the site in October and November: the Detroit Fire Department Training Academy, the Forest Arms Apartments, Comerica Bank Center, Mercier Building, Monteith Elementary School, the Scarab Club, the Detroit Historical Museum, and the long-since demolished Fort Street Congregational Church. We also updated the Renaissance Center page with details and renderings of the proposed demolition of two towers as part of a $1.6 billion re-envisioning of the iconic building.

Our friend Vance Patrick lent us binders upon binders of rare historic Belle Isle images, and we have completed scanning hundreds of images. We’ve been cropping and touching up photos, and will be rolling these images out in batches. We’ll be sure to let you know when they're up, and, as always, our Patreon supporters get early access.

Year in review

We made a lot of progress in 2024, thanks to those Patreon supporters. There were 100 new locations added this year, ranging from landmarks like the Renaissance Center to churches to schools to the stately mansions built by auto barons and the like. That’s more than we’ve added in one year since launching the site in 2011.

There were just shy of 2,700 images by Helmut uploaded this year, chronicling not only the exteriors but stately interiors of many places our site’s visitors have never seen. From the Players Club to the Detroit Club, from the reborn Michigan Central Station to the doomed Packard Plant, Helmut and his camera gear were all over the Motor City, documenting for not only your eyes, but for posterity. We also added about 500 historical images for various locations.

Because we know you love vintage Detroit postcards as much as we do, we added about 300 new scans to the site, and just scanned about 300 more, so this number will grow before year’s end.

We also upped our presence on social media, ensuring posts every day - sometimes multiple posts. This ranged from our efforts to fight the demolition of the historic Detroit Boat Club and spreading awareness about how people could stand up for its preservation, to our new then-and-now feature that has proved popular, to our routine “on this date in Detroit history” posts. We’ve been most active on Facebook, but are trying to up our frequency on Instagram, as well.

In order to reach as many people as possible, we’re also launching a Substack that is free to join. We know this site has a LOT of content to sift through, so we’re going to make selections of new and past material. You can follow at substack.com/@historicdetroit. Again, we JUST launched it this week, so give us a bit of time to populate it. But I think it will be a good avenue for more people to see the work that our Patreon donors are helping to support.

We look forward to continuing to tell the stories behind the bricks in 2025 and beyond.

September 2024 site update

Sep. 24, 2024

Dan Austin here. So, why is the September site update so late? Well, I have some personal bad news, and at this time, I don’t know how it’s going to affect the site in the short term or the long.

In early August, I was diagnosed with late-stage (stage III-C) cancer. My life has been consumed by speed dating with various hospitals to determine where to seek treatment, all sorts of tests and doctor’s visits. This week, I had surgery to install my chemo port, and begin chemo on Thursday. I share this not in seeking sympathy or pity - just to explain why updates were few and far between last month. On the flip side, I’m hoping I’ll be able to write while receiving my treatment. At the end of the day, I just don’t know how I’m going to feel. But I’m hopeful.

Luckily, HD is now a two-person operation, and Helmut continues to pick up my slack.

In September, we added the Players Club, including a bunch of photos by Helmut. He added pages to host his photos of Alhambra Apartments, King Solomon Baptist Church, First English Evangelical Church and the Detroit Press Building. September saw Helmut add 320 images in all.

In other exciting news, our friend Vance Patrick - one of the driving forces behind saving the Belle Isle Aquarium - has lent us binders upon binders of rare historic Belle Isle images. We will be adding those over the next month or so.

Thanks for supporting what we do and bearing with me while I embark on this long fight. -d.a.

August 2024 site update

Aug. 23, 2024

Last month saw us cooking with Crisco, as we got back to site updates following the historic reopening of Michigan Central Station.

Our patreon members Patreon members got early access to two new additions to our site.

We added photos and history for the doomed Charles Kettering High School, a storied school on the city's east side that is slated to meet the wrecking ball.

We also added the Temple of the Maccabees, which started as a lumber baron’s mansion and wound up being felled for an Albert Kahn-designed Art Deco masterpiece. I’d looked at old postcards and photos of this far more modest ‘Bees hive for years. Though not one of the city’s most historically significant buildings, I’m glad to finally tell its forgotten story. We also added a brief page on one of the more unusually shaped buildings that once stood in Detroit, the parallelogram-shaped Otto Schemansky & Sons Building on Gratiot. We also added St. David’s Parochial, Van Zile, New and Marion Law elementary schools.

We also added more photos of the Renaissance Center, the Players Club and Detroit Institute of Arts. We’re working on getting permission to document a couple of other rarely seen interiors, and hope to bring you news on that next month.

Thanks to our Patreon members for everything that we do!

July 2024 site update

Aug. 2, 2024

July saw us add a few new buildings to the site, including the Lucy Thurman YWCA Branch.

Though segregation was not as bad in Detroit as it was in the South, there were still many restrictions on where Black Detroiters could live, work, and even play. This could range from hotels to recreation centers. This made facilities like the Thurman YWCA and the St. Antoine YMCA (built in 1924 and demolished in 1964) vital pillars of the Black community.

After integration led to the Thurman YWCA's closure, the building became home to the Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Center for alcohol addiction, which was run by an eccentric priest named Father Vaughan Quinn. He would drive around Detroit picking up clients for the clinic in a 1917 fire engine.

The Thurman was demolished in 1998 to make way for Ford Field.

Learn more about the Thurman Y, the Prohibitionist that the branch was named in honor of and more on our site. Photos of the Thurman are very hard to come by. If you have photos or memories we'd love if you'd share them.

Helmut took a well-deserved vacation in July, but that didn't stop him from adding photos to the site, including updated demolition photos of the Packard Plant, which continues to come down day by day.

Accomplishing the 'impossible': Michigan Central has been reborn

Jun. 10, 2024

When people walked into the abandoned Michigan Central Station, they often said, "No way."

There was no way it could be saved. There was no way its lost grandeur could be restored. There was no way someone would ever come forward to undo nearly four decades of neglect and decay.

But Ford Motor Co. has shown where there is a will, there is a way. Michigan Central Station opened its doors June 7 to the masses for the first time since 1988. The results of a six-year restoration have given Detroit not only one of its most familiar landmarks, but has risen the bar on what is possible through preservation. It also has helped flip the script on our city, turning one of its most notorious symbols of disinvestment and decline into one of promise and pride.

We have added some 325 photos of this restored architectural wonder, and on social, we posted some before-and-after images that really show off what the 3,100 men and women who worked on this project accomplished over a staggering 1.7 million hours of labor. Helmut Ziewers has seemingly spent as many hours documenting nearly every corner of the building, and his work is available for you to see thanks to our generous Patreon members. Helmut even covered the opening concert on June 6.

As some of you may know, our lead researcher and writer, Dan Austin, is the communications director for Michigan Central. With the opening festivities being all-consuming (including a literal 20-hour work day on June 6), non-photography-related site updates have had to take a backseat. Once things settle down, however, he will be back at it. You can bet a restored 1913 train station on it.

For those in Michigan, Ohio and willing to make the drive, Michigan Central Station's restoration needs to be seen to be believed. Some 60,000 free tickets for the 10-day OPEN House were snatched up the first day they were made available, but the public will be able to see the depot without a ticket from 5-9 p.m. Fridays and 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturdays without a ticket starting June 21 and running through August.

April 2024 site update

Apr. 18, 2024

There were 34 buildings that got new pages added to the site, though we’ll admit, most of those were shorter entries on houses. The two most substantial additions were the former Greyhound Bus Garage on West Fort, which demolition wrapped up on this month, and the Majestic Hotel, a long-gone piece of Detroit's Roaring Twenties that serves as a reminder that underneath all those parking lots near the Fox Theatre and Little Caesars Arena is a story. We gave our Patreon members early access to the history on the Majestic Hotel, so hopefully you got the e-mail with a brief synopsis and the link! We were busy with the camera, too. We added 500 photos and a whopping 81 photo galleries in March. Now, many of those were for the houses that joined the site, but not all of them. Among the highlights are Fisher Body 21, a long abandoned eyesore that recently began a major renovation into apartments. Others include the Southwest Hospital near Michigan Central Station, the latest on the demolition work going on at the Packard Plant and the Greyhound Bus Garage (pictured here).

March 2024 site update

Mar. 11, 2024

Here is your recap of site updates from February 2024 ...

We added six buildings to the site: Pewabic Pottery, Belcrest Apartments, Mount Calvary Lutheran Church, Harpo's (originally the Harper Theatre) and an exhaustive write-up on the Comique Theatre.

As promised, our Patreon patrons got first dibs on the Comique, a fascinating forgotten theater that you won’t find information about anywhere else. It involves “tramp jugglers,” “shooting wonders … who shot the ashes off a cigar held between the teeth using rifles and pistols,” a contortionist named Dracula, and a hero named Arcady Bubnob - not to mention what was said to be the largest electric sign ever erected on the front of a building in America … at the time anyway.

After averaging 350-some new images a month, Helmut took a well-deserved vacation in his native Germany, so our galleries took a step backward - with a mere 236 images added in February. We’re sure there’s still plenty for you to look at. Mariners Church got an extensive photo shoot by Helmut, and we added photos of the demolition of the Hannan Memorial YMCA on East Jefferson, Hanneman Elementary, the Savarine Hotel, the Hotel Eddystone and more, not to mention images of the aforementioned new locations added to the site.

And all of this is made possible by our Patreon patrons' generous contributions! Thanks for supporting what we do! If you'd like to help support us, and get some cool swag in the process, please consider lending us a hand!

Farewell to the Hannan

Feb. 12, 2024

Demolition began Feb. 12, 2024, on the Hannan Memorial YMCA. Its demise was not a surprise, as the building had a target on it for years. But as we like to remind demolition enthusiasts, buildings are made of more than bricks - they are made of our city's stories. To learn more about this doomed east side landmark, head over to our page on the Hannan. We will chronicle the Hannan's demolition over the next month or so. The Hannan is only the latest historic Detroit building to fall to the wrecking ball in the first month and a half of the year, with the National Theatre and Hanneman Elementary also succumbing to the wreckers' siege. After several years of seeing historic preservation victories, the last year and change have seen the city revert to old form.

February 2024 site update

Feb. 8, 2024

Here’s your January update recap.

We added four churches to the site: Assumption Grotto, St. Francis D’Assisi (pictured above), St. Hedwig and St. Peter’s Episcopal. We have two in-depth histories that just didn’t quite get over the finish line last month, but when they post this month, our Patreon patrons always get early access. We’re quite happy with what we’ve unearthed from the newspaper archives, and think you’ll find our histories quite interesting.

We added 28 photo galleries, including historical and current ones for the four churches above. Others included Coleman A. Young International Airport (aka City Airport), Mount Calvary Luthern Church, Harpos (formerly the Harper Theatre) and the Hartz Building. We also have been documenting the demolitions of the National Theatre and Foch Intermediate School. All in all, there were 304 photos added in January alone.

And all of this is made possible by our Patreon supporters' generous contributions! Thanks for sticking with us and supporting what we do!